First up is Rob Garner, VP Strategy at iCrossing and a VP at SEMPO. Rob started things off with a description of the challenges that most often occur with measuring the search channel.

90% of search channel bugets go to paid media, but paid media supplies 20% of returns. Only 10% of budgets go to SEO but a huge percentage of search marketing performance can be attributed to SEO.

Why is this? Paid search is easier to measure. But… SEO can be made easier to measure in aggregate and at the keyword level once a balanced program is implemented. The biggest opportunities in search are with SEO.

Challenges on the client side regarding measuring SEO performance:

Disconnect between legacy systems in tracking performance

Using last click attribution

Large companies measure value as “what have you done for me lately” natural search benefits tend to be longer term

Not maintaining search performance history going back years

Bad analytics and tracking

Educating those holding the budgets for natural search

A longer term view of natural search is needed to understand the value. Natural traffic is earned but eventually owned. Look at maintenance costs of SEO as a realistic expense, especially in comparison to the contribution to revenue.

4 Key measurements needed for meaningful SEO metrics:

Value of searchequity for the site being optimized

Media value of natural search traffic

Value o various action across the site (individually and in aggregate)

Value of the stress and time costs on your organization. The cost savings of doing it now, vs. doing it later (retro-fit)

Building a Business Case – Key Questions

How much is invested in search

How much is a conversion worth? How much will it change with SEO?

How do we measure lift in natural search metrics

How much opportunity may be lost without a SEO plan?

Calculating Advertising Value Equivalent for SEO:

Find out the anticipate traffic lost or gained in natural search

Determine the average CPC in a themed area of one of your campaigns

Multiply the average CPC times the amount of SEO traffic to quantify its media value. For example: 100k clicks times an average CPC of $2.63 is valued at $253k. In a year, that value is over $3 million.

Case Study: A banking site re-launched with renamed URLs and no redirection plan. There was a spike in 404 errors and $1.5m in actual revenue per month lost.

Marketers must place a monetary value on actions to help SEO quantify results. Place a value on actions and also on lifetime value. When forecasting potential lift from SEO, be very conservative with traffic estimates.

Be sure to measure Year over Year trends, not just month to month to create context for growth and overall perfornance.

Next is Todd Friesen, Director of SEO for Performics who talked about incorporating SEM and SEO reporting to draw attention to the impact of SEO. “SEO hasn’t been getting it’s due”

Benefits of a combined SEO and PPC strategy:

Visibility in both paid and natural decreases the frequency that consumers select a competitor

Great opportunity to increase overall revenue

Both can result in a significant lift in brand visibility

Managing both tactics holistically yields great results than using any one tactic. A big problem is that measuring in silos doesn’t give a complete picture.

SEO and SEM do not exist in silos. It’s only in the past few years that marketers are actually figuring out how they can work together – looking at data and approaching it holistically.

Last up is Catfish, Director of SEO at Business Online who focused on key metrics and reporting.

Key Metrics: How to tell if you’re winning or losing. Three phased approach. Performance, opportunity and prioritization

Performance Reporting:
Search Rankings – It used to be that when you ranked #1 on Google, you ranked #1 on Google but now rankings can vary according to localization and personalization. Search rankings can be useful for month over month comparisons, but otherwise are not the best indicator of success.

Take your keywords and break them into groups, segment into brand vs. non-brand terms plus long tail keyword performance year over year.

SEO Intelligence is a service that leverages Adobe Insight to look at SEO data. It tracks at the visitor level and supports cross channel attribution (online and offline). Also supports predictive modeling. Ray is very enthusiastic about SEO Intelligence!

There were a few audience questions but I’ve used that time to finish off this post so I can publish it within a reasonable time.